Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Josh's Zelazny Tribute: The Great and Groovy Game!

I said a while back that I don't really write fiction. I used to. I
wrote my own stories as a teenager, but I think every teenaged geek did
that. I had discovered Zelazny in my early teens and while I could eventually mimic
the superficial characteristics of his prose, I lacked his imagination
and his depth and breadth of knowledge, and now that I look back at the
stories I had written back then from the vantage point of adulthood, I
see them for the fan-fictiony knock-offs that they always were. Also,
I'm trained as a technical writer (and I even find work as one once in a while), and the skill set involved with that tend to be incompatible with
writing fiction. So I drifted away from it, and satisfied my need to
write with this blog, which is a strange combination of a weird Roger
Zelazny shrine and family stories.

If
you'll excuse the digression for a moment, my grandfather died in 2000.
I loved him more than almost anyone in the world. I was a painfully shy
kid and that endured well into adulthood. I had a chance to speak at
his funeral and I was petrified at the thought of speaking in front of
so many people. But I knew if I didn't, that I would regret it for the
rest of my life.

So, I put together a list of the things I loved
and admired about him and when the time came, I got up and said them.
And I never had a problem speaking in public again. I call myself an
atheist, but I also call that his final gift to me.

And likewise, with
the October sequel, I didn't know if I would have a good idea or if I
could express it, but I knew that I had to try. I knew this would be my final chance to write
this story (this was before Mike Davis announced that this would be an
annual event), so I screwed my courage to the sticking place, did my
best and sent it off.

And here we are. And well, you're probably reading this because the story was published. (If not, here's the link!)
You can read it on the web or buy an issue for a buck on your Kindle or
Nook. Buy it today! Support your local starving artists!

I
particularly like the art they used for my story. I had no idea that
that there would be art and certainly nothing that good. I'm always a
sucker for cover art that actually reflects the source material, and I
would have loved this piece even if it had nothing to do with me.
Likewise, I didn't know there would be an mp3 version of the story. I
love audiobooks! (And they even pronounced my name correctly, which is
something that very rarely happens in real life.)

If I ever do go on to write more fiction, this will be one of the two events that moved me. Lovecraftzine actually pays its writers. The fact that it's
any amount at all tells me, hey, maybe my writing is good enough that
people want to read it!

The other thing, and the one that is
more important to me, is that I was reading a story I had written for my
daughter to her and she was bouncing up and down on the couch and beaming throughout it, and when I got to the end she said "I could see it all happening in my mind!"

So, check out Lonesome October. Check out my story and all the others! I'm happy with it and I hope you will be too.

21 comments:

Man, I've been waiting all DAY for this post. Mostly because yours was the first story I read (aside from my own, for proofreading purposes) in the issue. It's also the ONLY non-mine story I've read in the issue. And the reason I wanted you to post about it was so I could comment, and tell you that I hate you, because your story is WAY better than mine.

Seriously, Josh--you REALLY captured Zelazny's voice and style. (And you captured Dr. Kovacs's annotation style, at the end!) One of my favorite lines (and, perhaps, one of the more Zelaznian ones) was:

***On my way back I hit the hotel and wrote “Free bacon” in jagged block letters with no concern for artistry. I’m not even sure I got the right apartment.***

Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

Not only did your sentence structure sound very similar to Zelazny's, but you got all the great mentions of mythology and whatnot. If you (or Chris, or anyone else) ever put together a Lonesome October paperback anthology that includes fellow Zelazny-lovers like Neil Gaiman or Steven Brust, I expect you to include your own story in the mix. It's definitely worthy of the company.

I'm reasonably pleased with it. Reading it now, a good two months after I submitted it, I see a couple things I would change, but I'm a perpetual tweaker. I knew I had to send it off or I'd be fiddling with it right up to the deadlines.

I think if I had to change one thing, I would have hosted the annotations here. When Mike asked for something after the story, I gave him that, but I think I made a mistake there, because I think their inclusion takes the reader out of the story. Ah, well. I'll get it right next time.

I haven't read everything yet either. I've read your story and I quite liked it, which shouldn't come as a great surprise, as our tastes seem similar in most things, your heresy regarding IF AT FAUST YOU DON'T SUCCEED notwithstanding. (And I'm pleased that I have a picture of you so when I burn my paper mache Zach in effigy, it will really look like you.) Another one I really liked was The Blackbird Whistling.

It was movie night here last night, but hopefully I'll get the chance to read the other stories tonight.

I did see it, but I thought maybe you'd just felt obligated to say something nice, so I didn't comment.

(And just so we're clear, that's not me calling into question your Reviewer's Integrity, so much as it is me being unhappy with my own work. I actually liked my story a lot more before I read everyone else's, because at that point I realized how good a Lonesome October tribute could actually be!)

Since I'm such a slow writer, I started working on it about two months ago. Then I saw the post in early May saying that he was putting new submissions on hold, but I was already well underway and I thought I would just self publish it as an ebook, because it was over 15,000 words at that point.

And just this weekend, I saw the email asking about a new Lonesome October story. I'm not sure quite what to do. It's going to be well into novella length when I finally do wrap it up, and I have no way of trimming it down significantly.

I suppose I could always go the route Zelazny considered for the Last Defender of Camelot and cross out every other word, but that seems inelegant.

At long last, it's coming along reasonably well. I mentioned above that I started a story and I was really happy with it, but it grew and grew, well beyond what the magazine would hold.

So I put that one on ice and started something completely new. I had a couple false starts, but I'm finally in a groove with it. Unfortunately, I am a very slow writer, and I'm acutely aware that I'm much less further along than I was last time this year.

I don't think you have any reason to be intimidated. Your story was one of the best in last year's issue. (In fact, yours was the only one I re-read this year for inspiration before writing mine; although I did also skim "Twenty to Life in the Lonesome October," which is another fantastic story.)

I submitted my story last week, at the aforementioned 9.3k words. We'll see how it goes.

I can't re-read my story. Every time I try, I get stuck on the same spot and wish I would have realized it was slowing things down before I'd submitted it.

Also, YOUR story was definitely the most Zelaznian. That's actually why I reread it before writing my story this year. (Not to say that made this year's story any better than the one I wrote last time, but I dunno, maybe it helped.)

I think that "The Blackbird Whistling" rounds out my three favorites from last year's issue (with yours and "Twenty to Life"). I actually haven't read it since last year, but I seem to recall it being awesome.